My comments RE condition of games
I got there fairly early Sat morning and a good percentage of the DMD games on the main area didn't work for a range of reasons primarily:
Balls missing
Flippers not working
and the games generally just not starting
Cosmetically some games were in very rough condition, and others I think would be ok for a first time buyer.
Games did indeed look like container pins that had not really had alot of time and money spent on them to get them fully functional.
The main thing that annoyed me about all of this, was that there were many first time pin buyers there and people who didn't know alot about pinball. If they were to buy most of these games from the auction, they were going to be up for ALOT more coin afterwards to get them to where they should be.
Saying that,
The best games on show were those from capital pinball and AMD which made sense in alot of ways. These guys are what made it an expo to me.
I have never been to an expo in the US, and I know some of you guys have (and I have read ALOT and looked at ALOT of pictures). The quality of pins at the US expo varies as well, but is generally ALOT better because it is a larger group of commercial sellers and guys with games to get rid of. Not to mention the larger population and hobby following.
I think that was the killer for the Aussie expo for me. A load of container pins pushed onto the public for auction that didn't really work well. If financially that was the only way they could get 100 pins on show for the public then so be it. It may not have been viable for the first expo to get all the big commercial guys from Aus to come for the expo (bumper, mr pinball, child, zax etc) and if that is the case then for the first expo ever, I think they did quite well. However I think we would get most benefit if primarily we had good quality pins and parts being showed off from commercial sellers, where the public are going to get the chance to buy decent working games and have a better playing experience. I personaly would pay 15-20$ entry towards the costs of getting that up and running. At $5 you most certainly could not complain, but some of us made a pretty big effort and travelled to get to the show and I personally was mostly disappointed.
At the end of the day it felt half like a small expo, half like an auction of crappy container pins being pushed as an expo on to the un-suspecting
